This is a français translation of a conversation between Bonella Holloway and Kamil Guenatri. A previously published English version of this text can be found here. Additional editorial help with the French text was done by André Éric Létourneau.

Artist Kamil Guenatri and his assistant Bonella Holloway sat in Guenatri’s flat in Toulouse on a Thursday morning. They recently returned from London, where Kamil performed his piece “10-14”, with Bonella’s contribution at the Tempting Failure Performance Art and Noise Art Festival this past July. The multiple levels of their relationship, artistic, professional and personal, become apparent through a dialogue on Kamil’s vision of performance art, his artistic process, his disability, and ham.

Artist Kamil Guenatri and his assistant Bonella Holloway sat in Guenatri’s flat in Toulouse on a Thursday morning. They recently returned from London, where Kamil performed his piece “10-14”, with Bonella’s contribution at the Tempting Failure Performance Art and Noise Art Festival this past July. The multiple levels of their relationship, artistic, professional and personal, become apparent through a dialogue on Kamil’s vision of performance art, his artistic process, his disability, and ham.

Bonella: Do you think that the bottom line of performance art is a body functioning in a space?

Kamil: In my works, space is a recurrent notion, and I think that it’s more or less unavoidable as soon as you’re confronting an audience: it happens within a space. It’s even more apparent in my case, because my work is often installation based. The body becomes an installation, the installation is built with the body itself. The sculptural body. My face is no longer a face, it becomes a surface in the space, that undergoes a series of modifications. When I try to imagine a performance in a specific location, the space is the starting point of the performance.

There’s also another aspect, the use of the body, the outskirts of the body, as a space in and of itself, and here space is not physical, but corporal. And on a more abstract level, I work with invisible space— how to create an emotion or something that cannot necessarily be seen, but that is communicated through the audience’s presence: as an exchange.

So for me there are three types of spaces: physical, corporal and invisible. And I work with all three, or one and the other…often all three.

B: The body in a space, do you necessarily mean your own body that has a different mobility to others? Do you base your research on the function of your personal body?

K: People often say, the body is subject, it’s kind of acknowledged by the majority. In my case, because my body is immobile, I can’t say that my body is subject. When I present myself I’m Kamil, with my experience, so the subject “Kamil Guenatri” is put forward, transmitted, seen and felt, so it is the subject. But again with the sculptural aspect: when I imagine a performance, for me my body is an object, definitely an object. It’s separate members, and I integrate these objects as you’d integrate elements to an installation. Being immobile allows me to represent my body as an object. And being object suggests being manipulated. It is moved in the space, modified, displaced, transformed. And that’s where my assistants play their part.

B: I’ll get back to the assistants later, but first can we talk about objects, the other objects you use? How did this corpus of objects develop throughout your practice? Are the objects symbolic?

K: To explain this part I need to explain my work process. It’s not always the same recipe, but something keeps coming back and persists. It often starts off with an image, a mental image. This image is me, or a part of my body, or another body, not mine, a male body. And the body is doing something.

B: Do you mean your collaborations?

K: No, a body.

B: Your male body?

K: No. No. It’s um… It’s not an ideal, it’s not me in a body that I’m not, I don’t see it as a fantasy, I feel that… When I’m in a performance festival, 90% of the artists that I’ll see are able-bodied. So my imagery of performance art is normative. If I saw a lot of disabled people doing performance art, my imagery would be different. So it’s this undone image of me, willy-nilly, it’s a silhouette. I don’t care so much about this silhouette, what interests me is what he’s doing. The action becomes obsessional, the image keeps coming back. In these actions there’s a recurring language of objects. Objects that communicate amongst themselves. They’re symbolic, or visual, but inspired by my obsessions, and by my culture of performance art. I’m soaked in lots of other performance art, that I reuse, with my own curbs.

They’re part of my imagination, and the more I use them they tire, and new images appear and so on.

K: Yes, I think if you take each individual performance you could add them up to find a whole meaning.

B: More than a guideline, a big continuity of smaller fragments.

K: Yes, an ongoing process. That I often bypass, towards new researches. Intellectual counts, not just inspiration. A bit of both, but conducted.

B: So the objects and images are recurrent, with the use of your body used as a patterns that are repeated, and what we mentioned earlier, your assistants. Have you always embraced the idea of integrating your assistants with their specific part in your performances, or to begin with was this more of a constraint than anything else?

K: Well, back to this image, there’s a point where I say to myself, “shit this is too complicated”, I can’t do this alone. And just like in my day to day life, I have assistants that are there to compensate my disability and to help me. If a lightbulb needs changing, my assistant does it for me. As I’m in the field of contemporary performance that incites us, as artists, to not dissociate what we live and what we show, it seems legitimate that my assistants do this artistic work for the images to exist. My potential is my own, my assistant’s, my wheelchair’s and everything that surrounds me in my daily life.

B: During the conference at Tempting Failure, you mentioned that the way each performance develops depends partly on the assistant that you’re working with. This was the first time I recognized this idea, I hadn’t taken into account the importance you gave, not just to your assistant, but to which assistant you chose for a specific performance.

I saw a reflection of my own work in your last performance [‘10-14’ (2016)], in which I assisted you. When you’re developing a particular performance, do you chose who you’re going to do it with, or is it simply that through working with this or that assistant, the ideas and personality of whoever it is permeates your work as a form of exchange?

K: I don’t guide the process in that direction. I don’t take on the role of a stage director, who knows his actors and digs into their personality. On the other hand, I have a group of assistants that work 24 hours. With these six assistants, I follow my schedule as a performance artist, and if a performance is on a Saturday, then I’ll think ahead, and two months beforehand tell whoever’s working that day, “We’re going to perform together!” From there on, I know who’ll be doing it. It’s a compromise between what’s easiest for me, and optimizing my relationship with my assistants.

In your case it was very obvious, because you also make performance art and in our practices have lots of things in common: food, sound, in your readymade approach, that’s simple and shows things as they are. So in the case of our work together it’s blatant. We almost don’t need to think it over. And so, coming back to the example of TF, because you make music and that, I wanted to give it a go too, I figured it was a good opportunity. It would have been a shame to not do it, so there’s this image to begin with, and I find it interesting to give it different forms. The shape it’ll take with Bonnie, with Camille… it’s like a series of paintings, it’s never exactly the same. The factor that changes is how the assistant and I collaborate.

With other assistants, take Audrey for example, who is very—like in her video work: it’s very refined and thorough. Subconsciously, the images we make together resemble her artistic architecture.

B: Right, in the performance that you did with her at the Cave Poésie [“10-14”, (2015)], despite there being similar gestures to the ones from the performance in London, it was definitely more meticulous, precise and methodic, in the way she moves. And it’s not just her personality, I think it’s in your relationship.

In the exchange in the month before the performance, when the process is already developing, without its audience, do you feel that these factors are already taken into account? Or do they just happen, as an unplanned result?

K: I don’t foresee everything. Perhaps that’s the part that just happens autonomously—there’s always a part that just happens. Especially because you’re integrated to my daily life. You’re impregnated by me outside of the performance and I know you outside of this context too.

I’m trying to be more and more attentive to it. There’s the visual design—I have an image, I want to make it. This is a really important factor. But it’s not just this, there’s another design. The design of the experience.

It can become visible, but it’s something that is conveyed, communicated. It’s what can be perceived in what’s there. I try to use my own experience as much as I can in my performances, but with the assistant’s presence, it’s my experience, his experience and what we do together during the performance. And this I don’t try to control.

B: That’s the part that neither you, your assistant, nor the audience can control. The part that escapes control.

K: So what interests me, is to see how this turns out, the result. It feeds my imagination for the next performance, and the leftovers are visible. It takes shape.

B: This tension, the exchange that takes place between you and me in your performance, is something that, when we’re at your house and doing the gestures of your daily routine, doesn’t exist, because they’re actions that we do repeatedly, carefully, but in front of an audience there was such a tension between us, which is obviously intangible, can be seen quite clearly. At least, I’ve experienced it as a spectator at other performances of yours. What is strange, and different from when I’m doing my own performances, whether they’re collaborative or not, is that my tension is related to my own self-awareness, and the image I’m conveying. At TF, my experience was completely different to this. Being your assistant allowed me to have absolutely no awareness of the audience, of my image in front of them, of how they could perceive my presence—I was scared, playing the performer’s part, but because of taking care of you, doing the same habitual actions from our daily life, which have become movements that demand worry and care. The particular tension of being over aware of your well-being, not the “Kamil’s performance needs to go right”, but “is Kamil, the everyday Kamil, OK”. And this is why I find it so interesting that you use daily actions, because I keep the mindset from our everyday.

K: It’s more difficult to repeat a daily action in a performance, than the daily action itself on a daily basis, even for me.

Sometimes I think to myself, hang on, you’re getting stressed out about doing three times a day. I know exactly what you mean, you couldn’t see the audience.

B: No, not at all.

K: I could definitely see them. For me if you couldn’t see them you weren’t acting, you were really living what you were doing. It was sincere.

B: I didn’t feel like I was acting. Although it can probably come off as dramatic, I don’t feel that there’s pathos of anything theatrical about it, because it’s very real, even when I bind your face with blue thread – which we don’t do on a daily basis – it’s done simply. Drama free.

K: And this is where I don’t agree with some peoples idea of performance art. For me performance art, and this is how I intend it, is something that’s action inspired and so I can’t dramatize or stage it, this seems ridiculous to me. I think it’s a pity regarding history of art and performance art to go back to that. Been there, done that, get over it. What I do belongs to a family of performers, quite a big family, and that’s how they work, through actions.

B: Let’s get back to objects. Does the ham for example, in the performance ‘10-14’, signify something specific?

K: Firstly, like all objects, it’s an image. I’ve never performed in Paris, I’ve never tried to, maybe one day I will. One day I was with friends, joking about “parisienism” and “provincialism”. You know, provincials, and all the losers from the south. And I said that the first performance I would do in Paris would have a ham suspended in the air that I would cover in olive oil and herbs de Provence. That’s it. To awaken something sensorial , and the image stuck. In the meantime I developed the ideas, but when TF took place, and I’d seen the space already, I said to myself, why wait for Paris, let’s do it here. And you know the rest. We tried oil and realized it wasn’t all that interesting, the image unraveled, and got mashed up with my current research. I attempt to keep a certain relevance with my general process and the image transforms, it’s fed by all sorts of things that bounce off different factors that are important to me. Collaboration, the space, the images…

B: That’s another point we have in common in our work, the starting point is often a trivial joke or funny idea in a conversation.

K: Yeah, and this is one of the rare ideas that isn’t a mental image, it’s a social image.

B: Social, yes, but the audience wanted to see it as something more… spiritual or pathetic. As if the ham were an image of your inert body, upon which you transfer you t-shirt and your tattoo.

K: What interests me in this is the poetry. Jesus, Mary and a ham, I think it’s great, we really killed…God. God is dead.

B: I find that people want to see a more serious and intellectual side, the intense polysemy in your work, rather than the black humour, your cynical view of society, that reflects your perception of society in relation to the fact you’re in a wheelchair.

K: I’m a minority, I have an outside view on all this. It’s evidently critical, and feeds my work. And it is serious, I want it to be serious. But I try to keep a distance with the whole thing. For me performance art is a form of ritual. And once you have a ritual then you’re talking about what’s sacred. I put humour into sacred, it’s important, just to make it profane—

B: —to desacralize it, all the while using sacred codes, or pagan more like, because your work tends to connote satanic rituals…

K: I’m very influenced by the history of rituals and people. I make no difference between contemporary performance art and ancient rituals. There are such blatant common points between the two. I get somewhat trapped by my influences.

B: A trap?

K: No, but a reflection of my mystical influences, I REVENDIQUE myself as mystical on some levels, so the “invisible” and these things we can’t perceive or explain fascinate me. I find it interesting to dig into these ideas, but which a certain distance, so that it’s funny and sarcastic. It’s art, not a religion.

B: One last point, that fact that you’re part of a ‘minority’, when people see what you do, they tend to say that you’re talking about your disability. For me this is similar to the way people will undermine that a film about a homosexual is therefore a film on homosexuality, or that a woman’s work of art would be about her condition as a woman, or that a Muslim’s work is necessarily about their condition as a Muslim. What annoys me in this is that if you’re not an able-bodied white atheist man—

K: …the alleged silhouette—

B: …then we are ‘conditioned’ and that our condition would therefore overwrite any other subject and become our work. Are you simply talking from your experience, as a human being, or is disability a central subject in your art?

K: It’s my point of view, that’s undeniable. On the other hand, my point of view crosses others, but like all disabled person… My condition, is being in Occident, on a wheelchair, and occidentals in wheelchairs have more or less the same conditioning as I do, with their personal experience on top. My opinion integrates a global opinion. Disability in a common vision, is directly related to sorrow and pity – and that’s something I really can’t change! My body is a body of suffering in its representation, so whatever I do, that’ll always be stuck to me, because that’s what people think. So that is something I’m talking about, but I’m trying to demolish the very idea, with my images. It’s a form of bad faith, to demolish people’s perception of disability, it’s negative philosophy, a reaction, to stir their conscience. That’s the whole point of art in general, this transformation in the conscience of the onlooker, to displace their perspective. That’s my aim when I look at a work of art, I want something to change within me.

Day 9 of Tempting Failure featured 7 artists at the Hackney Showroom, a performance venue in Hackney, London, as well one performance at D:NA in Herne Hill, London. The performances at Hackney were held in either the larger main room, or the smaller studio. Listed below is a recounting of the following exhibitions and performances in the order they occurred on July 29th

Whenever I walk into a room for a performance, I immediately become aware of myself in the space, seeing where I should stand or sit, how I should act, the current mood of the space, and how the artist has defined these boundaries.

Walking into Chelsea Coon’s durational performance Diastole in the early afternoon made me instantly consider my surroundings and the effect she was trying to create. The atmosphere of the room had a sterile medical feel to it; the room was lined with what looked like face cleansing pads, which I felt subliminally told the spectators that they within in the boundaries of the performance. Coon sat in the middle in a circle defined by a single spotlight, and further defined by a ring of contact lenses; small stainless steel saucers and a tray lay in front of her with more contact lenses, small needles, and a piece of translucent thread.

Because Coon’s choice of materials were so small, she almost forced the viewer to come forward to investigate what she is doing and what materials she was using, otherwise her performance lent an ambiguity into the actions and materials she used for spectators who chose to stay afar.

Her actions were simple, and progressed slowly throughout the day. Though not necessarily in this order, she would place small piles of salt in the contact lenses surrounding her, and then dumping them out and connecting them, like something you would see in a ritual; the lines of salt were thin enough to just make it to the next lens. She would then place the salt back into the individual contact lenses erasing her progress. Every so often she would prick her finger with a needle, and carefully place a drop of blood into one of the lenses in the steel tray in front of her; she would then place the blood filled lens on one of the tiny saucers along with needle in front of her as well. There were ten contact lenses placed in front of her in total, one for each finger and one for each drop of blood. She also sometimes turned her back to the audience to face the fall behind her, or sat up straight, stretching her body with eyes closed. As much as I was aware, she never concisely made eye contact with the audience.

Coon cycled through and destroyed the progress of each of her actions in her performance; however, she was not just repeating the same actions, because even though they may be similar, each action is a new action that untimely progresses the performance.

Though I don’t feel this was the message of the work, I felt the repetition of her actions with only slight progressions spoke about our own tendency to get into routines while only taking minor steps forward through life.

One person at a time, Emma Lloyd invites for a non-verbal communication. On the hour, starting at 11am, you were invited to tell her anything you want. The only rule was to do so without your language as in words, but with any kind of non-lingual vocabulary you may inhabit, or want to use. Emma would answer (to) your story in playing her violin, and it would depend on each singular encounter, how your story – as in your own, as well as in the story of the two of you – would unfold. Either both of you had a monologue, where you start your time together, and she ends it, a ping pong dialogue, where both of you “talk” back and forth, or an ongoing conversation, where both of you create an over-layering environment of togetherness.

In each case you will have been together in present time. This encounter is yours. Your memory will carry it on. The openness of Emma Lloyd to receive you with any kind of information is a gesture of love. In an existential understanding, she is unconditionally open to be with you, to listen to you, to play with, and to play to you. She gives you her attention and offers you to give, what you are willing to give, to give you a response to that, and thus create a relationship with you for the time given. “Piece for…” is a beautiful invitation of being – together.

The vast space of Hackney Showroom is empty. As we move through the dark space we search for the performer. The fact that the dynamics of the performance are not clear makes me feel uneasy. Where do we stand? Where should we look? Where is Jin Bells? As the audience quietens into the space the sounds of banging, movement and an alarm fills the space from behind the large shutter. We stand looking at the shutter trying to imagine the image that matches the sounds. No matter how much I imagined I was not prepared for the image I was faced with when the shutter door was raised. A scene filled with several wooden structures surrounded by buckets and a hose with water that poured onto an upturned bucket, the sound of which perforated the air and created an atmosphere that was filled with tension. Jin’s nude body was contained within a cage like harness which had marked the surface of his skin with red flashes. These red inflamed flashes signified to me the time and action that had passed before we were even aware of Jin’s whereabouts. How long had he been there?

Bells sat within a large bucket shivering. Instead of struggling to free himself from the confined space he seemed to be struggling to fit himself deeper into the bucket. At the sound of the next alarm he moved onto the next apparatus, to which he attached the harness and hung suspended in the air. It seemed like a pause in the madness of the relentless cycle, but for me as a witness it wasn’t really a relief as the anticipation of what may come became almost as torturous as the actions that surrounded that moment. The next alarm alerted Bells to move to the upturned bucket, placing his head inside. The water poured into the bucket, much quieter than before. Whilst this created a sense of relief from the panic inducing noise, we began to hear the struggle of a head submerged and the need for breath, which was much more distressing than the noises of before. The next alarm created relief from the struggle but we then witnessed Bells bang his head, still in bucket, to the floor, water spilling as Bells shivered violently. This marked the end of the cycle, but the cycle repeated. Over and over. And over. My mind turned to torture, Guantanamo Bay and the act of water boarding… I felt deep empathy for Bells, and I wanted to interrupt the cycle. That was until I came to the realisation that Jin was doing this to himself. As we stood inside looking out at Jin I realised that we were looking on, observing a process that Bells was going through by his own choosing. He was doing this to himself. I wondered if this was a manifestation of a personal journey. A cleansing of his own demons? A cleansing of memories of the past? The presence of water seemed so relevant, but to see this cleansing element in such a violent way made me think about how often the cleansing / moving on from relationships can often be so painful to go through. The openness and vulnerability of what seemed to be an attempt at exorcism on Bells’ part allowed for us as the viewer to connect and share an emotional experience with him. This was not a presentation of ideas, this was not about illustrating a concept; this was a shared lived experience that went on beyond the shutter closing. It was not an action made solely for the audience to witness….this was a process that happened behind closed doors, beyond the performative space.

The small intimate room is dark, lit only by a light installation which consists of five fluorescent tubes. The light is suspended over a bath which is filled with hot water, awaiting the nine participants who, one by one, will share their experience of the bath with the viewers who observe from the periphery of the room. The atmosphere is serene as we wait and watch the participant enter the space carrying a bucket and pouring it’s contents into the bath. As they undress and climb into the bath I realise that as a viewer it feels very voyeuristic to look on from the shadows. I begin to consider how people are often so curious about the lives of others. How whenever I walk down a street in darkness, if a house has it’s curtains open and lights on, I cannot stop myself from looking in. We have an urge to look in, or imagine the life of others behind closed doors, and I feel that this installation created a platform where we were able to experience that guilt free.

It was interesting to consider how this work brought into question the notion of the performative space. This was the work of Robert Hesp, but the only time he was visible to the viewer was when he joined as a spectator. He didn’t occupy the bath. Although it was his space, he offered it up for occupation by others. It was interesting to see how participants occupied the space in a performative way. The way they moved in the bath was not always how you would normally experience a bath. The movements at times looked choreographed, and I wondered how much consideration they had given to what they would do in the bath beforehand. It was interesting to think how a set space can often change our behaviour, and how alien it can feel to try to act ‘normal’ in a space that is familiar in it’s domestic references, but unfamiliar in it’s context with an audience. Suddenly the ‘being normal’ can feel and look abnormal.

As the light flickered above and momentarily switched off, the room being plunged into darkness was a signal for the participant to leave the bath, and for the next person to collect their bucket of hot water. I was fortunate enough to be a participant in this work. I tried very hard to not think too much beforehand about how I would occupy the space. I wanted to be as present as possible, in order to really experience the surreal moment where I would bathe in front of strangers. As I undressed I could not help but be very mindful of every aspect of getting undressed and folding my clothes. I climbed into the bath making eye contact with some of those that looked on. I wondered if that voyeuristic experience would slip if I reclaimed the gaze through eye contact. I cannot comment on that as I didn’t manage to ask anyone that I made eye contact with. The eye contact did make me feel very present in the entire room opposed to just the space within the bath. There were moments of stillness as I tried to relax and just be in the bath. Gazing at the light felt hypnotic. Just like the bath, the light felt both familiar and unfamiliar in it’s form. I suppose the long bar like length of each element of the light felt reminiscent of the fluorescent lights we see so often in public spaces; but with it being so low above the bath and with in emitting a low hum of light it was also so very unfamiliar. This seemed to sum up the experience for me. The familiar/ unfamiliar experience allowed for me to really connect to the experience. When the light switched off I realised, now that I was concealed in the darkness, that I had been in an exposed and vulnerable position- but as an observer I realised that this is only, (in my opinion) a truly beautiful thing.

A clear set: We see six people installed in a room at different places for different tasks to come. One round, white spotlight on the main performer, Louis Fleischauer. It fades out and up comes a video assemblages of a pregnant woman holding a microphone onto her belly, and a droning soundtrack from a different source. A text flows over the images praising kaos over control and order as the only way to and of humanity. The video ends and yellow spotlights from either side of Fleischauer’s space pulsate a transition. A ritual shall begin, and for the next 30 minutes numerous attempts of running kaos over order are shown. All of them are conducted by Fleischauer himself – a clear trajectory, an order-ing of kaos.

The wanting wish, the longing for resolution through kaos is bigger here, than the actual action. The attempt to let loose was impossible to achieve, since too many factors had to function: the layers of sound, the sequential movements, the co-performers, the audience. Fleischauer had specific views on how his performance should play out, which prevented it to be a ritualistic and transient experience for everyone. The promise of birthing kaos was not fulfilled.

Further the fact of primordiality for Fleischauer was highlighted through the use of hooks on him and three co-performers, which refers to medieval Christian and non-Christian ways of healing, but also of torture. A wound always induces pain onto the physical body. The pain induced here, additionally seemed to have masochistic and sadistic origins, which both are immature ways of dealing with being-in-the-world. They are immature, because they refer to an other, an outside-of-the-self as the cause, the responsibility for the self-being as a self-suffering. Gaia would not want you to hurt you and others, Gaia would want you to surrender to her, but simply receive, what will be given, which is something unpredictable of a grandeur, that – no matter what is it – will be received within an acceptance of life, where there is neither pain nor fear, but pure energy of physical- and liveliness.

There is something about people wanting the absolute incalculable. People that step away from mainstream to find their niche of ideal expression and to follow their idealism. Unfortunately though idealism can easily become absolutism. The ideal free world under very clear circumstances leads to a mistakable incomprehensibility of acknowledging the self and others as same on this very earth as one. In “Primordial Kaos Invocation (return to Gaia’s womb)” Fleischauer mistook and thus prevented this very invocation through his very act of commanding.

Kylie came crashing in. Stood in a stark darkened hall of concrete floor, anticipating all of the possible outcomes, screaming and caterwauling feedback massaged my brain.

There have been a number of noise performances in this festival, but I felt this was the first to really be ‘free’ in the sense of child-like abandon present, with a degree of movement and free rein given from tackling something so high concept as reinterpreting a full Nirvana [In Utero] album. At times I felt there was a struggle to realise intention, but at others this struggle and tension seemed to miraculously dissipate and I would become briefly lost in the blinding strobe and the communal steady sway of the few noisers really vibing out hard, in a special way in some instances, across a sea of motionless spectatorship.

The performance was very short but I don’t feel it suffered at all for it – thundering and catastrophic as the whole affair was, there was a grace in the way things collided and tumbled down towards there end. I would stare into the strobe here and there and wonder at the possible subliminal messages flooding our brains in an unintelligible spew, only to manifest days off from now, like a permanent ink stain on your secretly favourite most expensive item of clothing. This night Kylie Minoise was a medium, the inebriated ghost of Cobain pissing into the unwilling mouths of unattentive bystanders to the blissful creation of a heavy and personal artistic release.

Rudolf Eb.er – Untitled (2016)

By Chelsea Coon

Eb.er sat upright on a table atop a sea of dark blue cloth that undulated onto the floor, legs spread open with his feet tucked behind him. Mesmeric sound permeated the air particles the audience breathed in and out. His face was covered with lapis lazuli pigment and on the floor was a vase with five white roses cut in ikebana method. He firmly held a stick with bells positioned upwards in his right hand, and a suspended accumulation of bells that positioned downwards in his left hand, which he convulsively shook throughout the duration of the work. To Eb.er’s right were five jars of various colored fluids with a clay quality and a woman outfitted in a black rounded rim hat, black clothing descriptive of her form, and heels that accentuated her movement. Her face was covered in mesh while her breasts were bare and exposed. Periodically, she would stand up, take a jar of the fluid and pour it over Eb.er’s head; it would slowly move down his face, chest, groin and onto the table. The final jar contained white fluid that when poured on his face he took on the property of porcelain. The power emanated in the space was extramundane as the shaking and sound intensified, and Eb.er’s eyes rolled to the back of his head. As if a portal was momentarily opened and closed, the work is encapsulated in the time at which it was revealed.

Day 8 of Tempting Failure featured 6 artists at the Hackney Showroom, a performance venue in Hackney, London, as well one performance that was held on the street. The performances at Hackney were held in either the larger main room, or the smaller studio. Listed below is a recounting of the following exhibitions and performances in the order they occurred on July 28th

Rosana Cade and Will Dickie, The Origin of the World (2016), Hackney Showroom, Tempting Failure.Photo: Julia Bauer, Courtesy of Tempting Failure

By David LaGaccia

“Mind the Turtles” the sign read before entering the world of Rosana Cade and Will Dickie’s The Origin of the World. This title is of course a reference to Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, which is an infamous painting depicting the genitals of a naked woman, but instead of a man depicting a woman, we have a woman exposing her own genitals in a 24 hour durational performance.

The space itself resembled a field, with sod covering the Hackney Studio floor space, and two turtles crawling around the room. Rosana Cade was in a sitting position, fully clothed, but legs spread apart with gentiles fully exposed; directly in front of her was a camera, recording and projecting the action on the studio wall. In front of her was Will Dickie controlling the audio portion of the performance. “1, 20” Cade would call out, and Will would call up an audio clip to start playing. Each clip featured preachers, mystics, Alan Watts, Hindus, Christians, sometimes a song, whoever, talking about their beliefs on the creation of the world, and then, with full gusto, Cade would mime the speech of the talkers using her labia, which…again…is being projected onto the wall, as if mocking, as if in jest saying “This is the real origin of the world.” After a timer ringed, she would pass out fruit or vegetables to people in the space.

I have to admit that the main image of this performance was at different points beautiful, disgusting, sexual, mysterious, banal, and humorous. Cade’s labia and vagina, prominently projected on the wall of the performance space shows that one part of the female anatomy could be so commonplace, controversial, and important to the human story of creation.

Over the duration of 7 hours, Lees and Gregory underwent their piece Present Tense. Sectioned off in a corner of space was the pile of mousetraps to be set and placed throughout the early hours of the morning. Lees would take a trap, one by one, and kneel on the floor to set it by delicately pulling the wiring mechanism back and locking it in place before sliding it into position on the floor to align it with the others. Her movements were calculated and swift. As the duration wore down her body there remained an elegance is her pacing and focus. The spacing between the traps was the width of Lees’s hand with fingers parcially spread. The use of her body as the tool to measure the space was compelling in the way that we come to understand the world around us is through the experience of how it relates to our body. Gregory stood in front of the piece meticulously taking notes on the progress of the work noting the amount of traps set, the time that had passed, what was consistent and what was manifesting as variables. Together, Lees and Gregory constructed space and documented the passage of time. The early morning hours this piece took place in made the repeated actions feel that much more immense; there was a sense that the work could continue on in an infinite loop. Each trap set was a manifestation of time that had passed while each trap that remained unset referred to future time. The audience was lined against the back wall of the space, and watched the work unfold with incredible patience. A truly beautiful work.

Amy will fall for you. At 1pm on Thursday, July 28th 2016, she promises to start falling for you. She will have fallen for you by 1.01pm. In order to witness her, she asks you to add her as a contact on Whatsapp and send her a message saying IWANTTOSEEYOUFALL. How?

You will witness this virtually and thus at a different time, than the fall itself. The immediate question of truth arises. The video of her falling reached me at 1.10pm. The video itself is not even one minute long. I am confronted with what I envisioned and what I saw. There is interference, but no congruency. My own expectations were of course not met. We haven’t met. I only imagine with my capabilities, what and how Amy falls. I don’t imagine it with her head, or her knowledge, her vision.

Heading for a fall is a beautifully silent and simple piece about mediated communication and the expected sensation, that in its mediacy leaves you with a vapid taste. Amy was performing for the document. She fell for you and you fell with her.

Tim Bromage’s Shift moves at a different pace than any other performance work that was shown during the festival. It consciously uses props, costume, and prepared monologues that force you to concentrate and think about the nature of the work and its context within a performance art festival.

Beginning his performance by sitting in a chair on a stage and wearing a hood, he began to tell a story. Revealing himself, he acknowledges the crowd and says that the hood doesn’t work that well because it doesn’t have eye holes. There were three stages to his performance; he would sit down at a microphone wearing a costume to recite a story; he would stand up at a microphone and recite a monologue, and lastly, he would break “character” and perform a magic trick.

The dreamlike quality of the monologues was tough to follow, but each time standing up he would begin, “I wake up, the room is warm and yellow,” and then in a haze describe the surreal quality of its surroundings. He always spoke in the first person.

Another segment of the work had him do magic tricks, breaking the “performing wall” and directly addressing the crowd. Vaudevillian in nature, these tricks were simple or non-existent. First he would illustrate the egg and bag trick, explaining the nature of the trick and how it works. He did this three times, first placing the egg in the bag and dropping it on the floor, next taking the egg and breaking it against his head, and lastly, succeeding in making it disappear. “There’s always a bag,” he would say, “there may or may not be an egg.” Moments like when he broke an egg on his face was a surprise where instead of the yolk, red ink sprayed across his clothes and face, looking like he was stabbed or shot.

I think the real trick here is the illusion of performance. What I mean by this is that, in any performance there is the literal interpretation of the events that unfold, and the artist using their body and actions to create an image, idea, or metaphor which is interpreted or misinterpreted by the spectator. We place value on what we see, but what we see may not be real. Bromage’s performance seems to be self-aware of this effect. This was a mysterious performance.

A small folded paper bridge, blood smudged detritus marks the space reminding us of the previous performance. The paper stack still looks untouched, looming next to the performer a silent reminder of what has been and what is still left to do. Almost in defiance of what remains a single sheet is taken from the top of the pile; on tiptoe, naked shaking arm outstretched. It is held, unmarked, suspended in space and light until it is released and floats to the ground. The action repeats and the paper falls to the floor twisting, gliding and clinging to the air each sheet finding its own space. Paper petals, white islands defining the perimeters of the performance.

We pause.

A small glass bottle is pulled from the performers vagina containing the teeth of her children and delicately offered out to the audience on the palm of her hand. A fragile reminder of what once existed unseen suspended inside her. These 10 tiny parts, once so valuable, now discarded and returned. An effort is made to complete the cycle as each tooth is held and pushed into the inside flesh of the performers arm – momentarily they cling onto the skin until the inevitable release and drop to the floor. They leap frog across her arms and chest – one sticks to her collarbone and I’m reminded of the falling pearls from a previous performance. These wounds do not bleed. Indentations in her skin, inverted bite marks trace the effort and sharp underbelly of the teeth. A single tooth hovers under her right arm. We wait. It will not fall. We are locked in, suspended in the act of waiting. The tooth remains outlasting the efforts of the performer to keep her arm in the air.

The fallen teeth on the ground are marked; a smudged fingerprint of menstrual blood catalogues their place on the paper. A series of invisible endings marking the failure to hold their space in time. The performance seems to end as the final tooth is stained. She waits a moment and then reaches once more to the paper stack. She pushes it over rupturing the space and at this point we realize that this is not an end but the start of another beginning.

Richard Herring’s “performance” Me 1 vs. Me 2 was an excruciating experience of unbearable length, pushing the jaded avant-garde art crowd to its limits where before it was finished there were many walk-outs, including myself…and on that level it was successful. Explicit images of nudity, feces, blood, exotic fetishes, or bodily fluids were nowhere to be seen; it was one man, a cue, and his snooker table.

Herring was quick to point this out to the crowd as he walked in the room, saying everyone will be severely disappointed that nothing shocking or explicit will happen, and that he was going to play against himself in a match of snooker for a chance to win the Chris Evans trophy. Through each round, Herring would act as commentator, Me 1, Me 2, and scorekeeper. That’s it.

As one person said to me, “You can watch it on TV, but in a performance art context you lose all interest.” And that is precisely the point. This work is more in line with something that Andy Kaufman would do, testing and pranking the audience. Performance can be a victim of its own tropes, reusing and relying on the same “shock” imagery, instead of true expression. Also, who said performance has to be serious? Some of the best performances I’ve witnessed if you were to describe them literally, were completely dumb in their actions, but “worked” nonetheless.

I have absolutely no idea how it ended, but the match was best out of three and the results are as follows:

Day 7 of Tempting Failure featured 6 artists at the Hackney Showroom, a performance venue in Hackney, London. The performances were held in either the larger main room, or the smaller studio. Listed below is a recounting of the following exhibitions and performances in the order they occurred on July 27th. Note: Rosana Cade and Will Dicke’s performance, The Origin of the World was a 24 hour durational performance that began at 11 p.m. on July 27th and lasted till 11 p.m. on July 28th. It will be covered in the Day 8 post.

[1]
Apocryphal, perhaps. Nikola Tesla is operating a steam driven oscillator in his town house laboratory at 46 Houston Street.

He is trying to resonate an object, much like an opera singer trying to break a glass with their voice.

Tesla is having no success. No matter how hard he tries, how much he increases the amplitude, the object refuses to respond. Silence, unmoving, until one of his laboratory assistants rushes into the room and smashes the oscillator with a large hammer.

Tesla found he was incapable of resonating with the object in his laboratory, but adept at shaking the rest of the street so hard that people believed they were experiencing an earthquake.

Janer and Vil sit across each other, half a meter apart, on their knees, in stillness. Both with dark short hair and light skin color, both dressed in black pants and shirts. Both with their mouth shut and their eyes open. Both from different continents and of different gender. Both from different sides of colonialism and its handed down history.

They look into each others eyes. Between them, on Janer’s right and Vil’s left side, a black, fabric suture set. A white light drops on them. Around them are five piles of grey bricks. This is a cold, frozen atmosphere. But their bond is of warmth and depth.

He begins to pull a first suture out of its container and into the skin of her forehead, then his, then hers again. She repeats that action and pulls a suture through the skin of his, her, and his forehead. Then they sit in stillness again. The light fades out.

Shortly after six lights go on: Five for the brick piles, one for them. Audience starts to build a brick wall between them up to a moment of fear that it crashes. It looks likely to fall. Debris? The wall has a window for them to continue to look at each other from the other side. The setting remains cold. The bond remains strong.

This wall is a fortress, an exclusion, a division, and a separation of values, privileges, heritages, feelings and possibilities. This wall was made by human hands.

For the rest of their time one is left alone with one’s own assumptions and insights of the human handling of human beings. They, sunk in their stillness with active eyes, keep their mouths shut. The metaphorical defleshing of the frontiers has long begun. Now: What needs to, what can be said for the obvious?

Johannes Bergmark, Stringed Stirrups/ I have been in you, you have been in me (2016), Hackney Showroom, Tempting Failure.Photo: Julia Bauer, Courtesy of Tempting Failure

Johannes Bergmark – Stringed Stirrups/ I have been in you, you have been in me (2016)

By Lisa Stertz

In a white beekeepers costume with black sandals in stirrups, he is suspended from the ceiling. Two metal strings hold him. Two violin bows hang below him. Four LED-lights shine on him. On the ground in front of him a table. A microphone in a transparent plastic bag on that table. An audio firewire interface, a bag of chips, and a beer under the table.

The “Stringed Stirrups” begin and Bergmark plays the strings with both arms and legs. His entire body is in movement and the sound that emerges resembles a howling of motor cycles and cars on highways or old, big machines from industrial manufactures. He proceeds to play the strings with pieces of wood, and the sound becomes more percussive, than droning. Through his movements, his playing is accompanied by a colored shadow dance on the ground of different blue’s, violet’s and white’s.

He stops distinctly, and goes over to “I have been in you, you have been in me” – an audible exploration of the sounds one’s body makes, while drinking beer and eating chips. Bergmark would put a microphone down his throat for this investigation. He is lit by one yellow light. Maybe to his surprise, maybe not, the most significant sound became his heartbeat, relating back to his first piece. Its strength could obviously not be flushed down with beer and chips. The juxtaposition of sounds from a far outside to an inner unknown was too big. The seemingly grand and the seemingly habitual gesture seemed to not want to get in touch. Wanted or not: A come-down.

Positioned in the center of the space were seven women kneeling in a total of two rows encircled by mixers, pedals, ipads and a ring of cables. Under the faint and at times more intense beams of focused overhead lighting, the image was revealed of women that were wearing shoulder length black wigs paired with black clothing. With their eyes averted, heads down and hunched over, they slightly swayed or remained still. At times their heads were slightly bowed, and at others their heads would be within proximity of their knees. They remained situated in this position for the entirety of the work. The manifestation of their voices was sometimes in unison and sometimes they were all contributing different sounds at once. The choir made the polarities between anxiety and calm merge in real time; their voices and tones went through cycles that ranged from a calming whisper to yelling, and back again to a whisper. I was reminded of sirens that lure travelers of the seas to their death. The women in Johanna Bramli’s performance constructed a haunting image that equally pulled viewers in and out.

An intimate and arresting work by Kamil Guenatri, ‘10-14’. The audience lined the space of the Hackney Showroom. Two spotlights illuminated the center of the space; one focused on Kamil and the other on a suspended mass of cured meat. The height of the meat was controlled by the movement of Kamil’s wheelchair, which he methodically pivoted in slight but indictable movements which created a clicking noise that echoed through the warehouse space. An assistant wrapped his face with light blue thread, evocative of veins and life itself, and as the accumulation grew more dense it became a barrier and felt suffocating. He then moved in circles around the spotlights on the floor several times before stopping in the far corner of the space. Here, his assistant carefully took him out of his chair and laid him on the concrete floor of the space, delicately placing his arms around the meat mass which was lowered to rest on his chest. She repositioned his body several times with acute awareness to his body. With a pair of silver sheers she began to slowly remove strips of Kamil’s clothing and stapled the pieces onto the suspended meat, which left Kamil exposed. To further emphasize this state of vulnerability, a polaroid camera was introduced and Kamil instructed in very clear phrases where to take the picture; close up shots of his hands, arms, chest, stomach and face which were then stapled onto the meat alongside the pieces of his shirt. The meet was then moved back up into the air out of Kamil’s arms. When Kamil physically left the space, he continued to fill the room.

“An aged man is but a paltry thing/ A tattered coat upon a stick” – Sailing to Byzantium, W.B. Yeats

We live with the bodies we are given, against our will and against our choosing, our parents’ genes passed down to us to survive in a harsh world. Our genetic plans determine our hair color, eye color, height, body systems and much more, from the day we are born to the day we grow old and die.

At the end of Kamil Guenatri’s performance ‘10-14’, a silence filled the large main performance space of the Hackney Showroom, with people walking around not knowing what to do; there was a shared feeling of being stunned by life and completely overwhelmed by the images they just saw.

What had happened was so simple, but sliced through the minds of everyone who watched it, like a scythe cutting through a field of wheat. With the help of his assistant Bonella Holloway, Guenatri has a blue rope wrapped around his face. He then circles around the room, so the whole crowd in the room can see this image. He then positions himself in a far corner, with a piece of smoked ham, which is attached to his wheelchair, being pulled up as he moves further out.

It should be emphasized that throughout this opening, his wheelchair was tied to the ham. This simple wheel and pulley system could have easily been created without it being physically connected to Guenatri, but in doing so, he strengthens the image’s connection between himself and a dead piece of meat: wherever he goes, it is bound to him.

Although most likely the performance’s concept belongs to Kamil, Guenatri’s assistant Bonella Holloway, also deserves credit in how she assisted Mr. Guenatri, and how she executed the performance’s main actions. From gently placing Guenatri on the ground and placing cushions under his head, to wrapping his arms around the descended ham, to cutting off his clothes and stapling them to the dried meat, to taking photos of portions of his body (providing us with a physical memory of his existence), there was a strong current of tenderness, humanity, and dignity in the way she treated his body, acutely aware of its physical limitations and pains.

Most haunting was Holloway’s last actions of picking up Kamil, evoking primal images of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a mother figure carrying Guenatri’s frail body, only it is a dead piece of meat that ascends, not the spirit of Christ; the fact that this action was done so routinely, only adds to its humane message, as if compassion is not some grand religious gesture, but it was just expected of her.

The image of Guenatri’s body gets passed onto the image of the object, completing the metaphor. The strength and weight of this image is so heavy, that not even the absence of the body or the crowd could hope to destroy its power. The material remnants of Guenatri’s shoes and ropes of bondage are left pointing towards the open door, as if to exit, while his image and spirit lingers in the air well after the performance has ended. The crowd stands in a circle around the ham to take in the image, and to see the ripped off clothes and the expressionless photos of Guentari’s emaciated body. While Guenatri bluntly makes the association of his body to a piece of meat, it would be foolish to think this is just an expression of self-loathing; there is a buried theme of the material body versus the spirit, what we physically leave behind and what lingers in its absence long after it disappears. In the end, the performance says that absence is not the antithesis of presence; rather absence allows the image (or spirit) to linger in the consciousness of the witness, minuets, hours, days and years after it has vanished.

A performance with this much humanity bound to it is an antidote to the images of nihilism, violence, anger, xenophobia, racism, masochism, sexism, and destruction of the self we so naively express and present to ourselves in performance, art, media and everyday life: it’s as if the current social-political climate expects each of us to stand on a street corner and flail ourselves publicly, apologizing for our own existence while preaching about the end of the world; I refuse to accept or believe in this; true images of exploding beyond the limitations of our own frail bodies, and how to act humane to another person becomes more shocking than any feces smeared or bloodied body could ever be. We are all life in all its shades; it just takes a performance like this to remind us of that.

Day 6 of Tempting Failure featured 6 artists at the Hackney Showroom, a performance venue in Hackney, London. The performances were held in either the larger main room, or the smaller studio. Listed below is a recounting of the following exhibitions and performances in the order they occurred on July 26th.

When one moves on a knife’s edge, it is likely to fall. What is better: The imbalanced fall or the balancing cut? In Zierle & Carter’s 3-h-investigation on the measure of all things, a wooden broomstick with knives at each end stabs them in their backs and holds them apart from each other. Yet it binds them together. Only as the two of them will they balance for the stick may not fall. A white mirror and a silver fork bonded around and thus immobilizing their hands with skin-color bandages become their tools, their weapons. Standing on white plates on a white salt circle, their battle for harmony begins.

Two figures, one setting : Two people, one relationship

At moments immovable, they create an immense tension, not least through their formal dark grey clothing. At times it resembles their shadows so much that they can be seen as idealized shadow figures themselves. The highly theatrical and abstract meets the completely secret and personal. Circling around their circle, they continuously try to feed each other with bread, that both of them wear as bellies under their shirts. This feeding becomes a tough tightrope-act. Their literary nutritious vocabulary suggests an easy access to their conversational play, yet its exact use is of another kind. The movements within are either slow or abrupt. Sounds either swell with intention or pop through physical non-attention. – A multitude of binaries is set into this piece. Binaries that cannot be overcome. Binaries that have to be leveled to the ground in order to step beyond.

Tiebreak : Breakdown

From a clean and stylized setting, Zierle & Carter fall out of balance and into chaos when the knife-stick falls a third time. They fall, and take this to a different outcome. In the last 60 minutes a set of actions evolves as a reaction to their surrender. The dynamics shifted. The binaries got broken. Their reinstatement will not function. Chaos was born and therewith a true approach to harmony under new stars. Only when you are ready to break free, you will find a bracing way back. Two stars burnt as candles in the empty stomachs of Zierle & Carters breads, while they would sit across each other, face each other among a fading light and a door – opening.

Upon entering the vast industrial space that is the Hackney Showroom you are confronted by a huge mound of earth, which sits at it’s highest point around a metre high and then several metres wide. The vastness of scale in both the space and material make me feel very small in relation. Looking around for Goldwater, I soon see that she is stood on a mezzanine floor, wearing the red sequinned dress that is so often present in her work. She stands so still and so quiet that the absence of movement seems very much present in my mind. The audience mirror her stillness and silence, watching and waiting for movement. The scale of the mound of earth and the stillness creates a sense of anticipation; with a timescale of 4 hours, I wonder what lies ahead….and I wonder also if Goldwater is looking down on the mound with the same sense of anticipation.

When Goldwater makes her descent she paces around the periphery of the room, her eyes fixed on the mound. As she stands next to me I feel that I share her gaze, that momentarily the boundary between viewer and performer is blurred. The slow silent pace is disrupted when Goldwater rushes forward and launches her body at the earth, and then surrenders to gravity as the weight of her body drags her down to the ground. As she progresses she uses her body to interact with the mound of earth. At the beginning, small actions such as the sprinkling of earth around it’s base seem to have a huge affect on the space it occupies. The mound, after a few small actions, meets my feet and the space is filled with soil, even if it is only small fragments. The smell in the air becomes thicker with every intervention.

There seems to be a duality in the relationship with the earth. There are moments of physical resistance through the pushing away of the soil, but then this is balanced through actions that seem to be much more caring and nurturing through gentle touch and attention to detail. I begin to wonder where the control is; is it the mound of earth which is so big and heavy that Goldwater’s body begins to struggle? Or is it Goldwater who is continually the one to dictate, (or attempt to at least) where the edges of the mound lie. There is a clear dialogue in the relationship between Goldwater and the mound, and it is beautiful to witness in the stillness and the silence that is only ever perforated with the sound of the pacing of feet, the grunt of a struggle or of the soil making contact with the ground. These sounds are so subtle, but like the subtle tiny actions at the beginning that occupied large space, these subtle sounds have are hugely affective; they create the bond of empathy between artist and viewer through the sensory experience of her labour.

After 3 hours, Goldwater returns to the mezzanine and lowers 30 metres of hair to the ground. To see something that is seemingly ‘of’ the body, so big in contrast to the body seems so surreal. The weight of it becomes apparent as Goldwater struggles to resist gravity as she lowers it to the ground. This hair is later buried into a spiral that was ploughed through an almost perfect square made out of the mound. As the square is so flat but raised slightly in the centre, I can’t help but turn my thoughts to death. Was this a grave? As the hair is concealed by the earth I begin to wonder if this battle with the earth is a metaphor for the battle with the body as it ages and nears death. Goldwater seems to reach a point of resolution, as she stands back, observes, shakes off the dirt, places her gold shoes on her feet and raises the large electric shutter before walking out of the space. Her walk is not the slow pacing that she walked at the beginning of the performance; this was a walk that seemed to be full of conviction. It was as if she had reached the point where she was able to move on and let go. She didn’t look back. Her job was done.

Four stations: A plastic table with a white tablecloth and an aluminum milk can on it. Another white, patterned tablecloth next to it on the ground with fourteen water-filled jars. Wyrick on a white cushion. A dark brown wooden chair. White tape, scissors, a knife and wooden clothespins under the chair. Behind him a set of long, thin, pliable wood. This is a small seemingly intact set up, but not all things are in perfect, spatial correlation to each other. Something might be wrong here.

Set with objects of farming in a sterile room marks a first rupture in the calm atmosphere. A second happens through the urge of (having no) time, that is evoked here, and Wyrick’s time-intensive making of a basket with the wood straps. A third is marked through a simultaneous action of fabricated eggs dispersing in the jars. Wyrick pulls nineteen of them out of his black long johns, lines them up, and one by one lets them fall into the jars. The last five he just smashes onto the tablecloth. There is no use for them, and soon after variations of a milky-red liquid emerge in the jars.

Upon the finishing of the basket Wyrick puts his cushion under the milk can and the left over eggshells into the basket, pours the liquid into the milk can, aligns the by now wet and red tablecloth next to the cushion, lies down on his back with bent legs, holds the basket on his stomach, opens the milk can and lets all the liquid run into his mouth and face, drinking and choking. With the last milky red drop the performance ends.

The two unfolding activities were unified in a final gesture, but through the very acting of Wyrick and the augmenting of the color red in the scenery the question of the wrong, that in the beginning was only underlying the setting, rose into an obvious undeniable unspoken. Any unification fell apart in(to) the unknown locale that was left alone. What is wrong here?

With a saw that spanned the length of her forearm, Selina Bonelli, dressed in white, began to wear away the securing threads of the buttons on her shirt off which fell to the floor. Placed in line with her navel, she pressed the saw down into her pants, and with exertion, tore through the fibers to open the crotch section. Her thighs to ankles remained covered. She sat on the floor, legs spaced apart to reveal her both exposed and partially covered body. Throughout the piece, she would meet the eyes of individual members of the audience that lasted a few moments but felt endless through the intensity of her gaze.

Bonelli picked up picture frames from a pile at her feet and removed the glass panel from the frame which were lined with charcoal dust that spilled out and accumulated on the floor. She then set aside the frame, held the panel of glass and with force broke them apart with her hands. The tension was palpable in the space. As blood slowly moved from her hands to her clothing, then the frames to the floor, it functioned as a thread that pulled all the elements together. She took the broken pieces of the glass and moved them into her inner thighs, and poured the excess charcoal dust on top. Three jars of honey were then emptied onto the accumulation pressed against her body. A mesmerizing work with its evocations of violence and vulnerability, loss and coping, remembering and possibly forgetting.

Performance can make me anxious, because it can reveal another side of a person that often lays hidden in everyday conversation. Personal histories, attitudes, and beliefs become exposed for all to see, placing the artist in a naked—vulnerable position. Sometimes things are difficult to talk about that needs a space of understanding, and there is a point in any form of relationship with another person where you need to accept them for who they are and not who you want them to be.

Esther Neff’s performance, The Scraping Shape of the Socially Cyclomythic Womb was one of the first performances in the festival to consciously use her voice to acknowledge the crowd, breaking the wall between the audience and the formal performance. Talking, or using the voice in performance art seems like it is taboo, where a majority of the work in performances is done mute, but this is normal in Neff’s work, whether performing solo or in the group Panoply Lab, using the voice is a recurring aspect of her work.

She begins the performance wearing black clothes, and saying aloud “I have a body,” and “we have a body.” She says this repeatedly as if chanting or in song while walking around the space, defining the space as the crowd begins to enter. There is a large piece of plywood leaning against the wall, and on one side of the room is a sewing machine and on the other side is a power-saw.

Social constructions has placed gender signifiers on these objects giving them a cultural symbolic weight to them before they are even used: advertising and Western society presents the saw as masculine and the sewing machine as feminine, but a saw is just a saw and it is us who places the word masculine or feminine on the object. In her performance, Neff firmly destroys any gender signifiers these objects may have had.

Picking up the plywood, she asks for two strong volunteers to help her. Two women stand up and hold the wood. Neff gives them instruction of how to hold it so she can start using to the to carve it with the saw: when she is done, the plywood is in the form of a giant female genital tract. During the course of performance, Neff breaks out of her “performing persona” and casually acknowledges the crowd, thanking them for their help.

Neff then begins chanting “You’re just a model,” aloud, and hands a woman a spool of black thread; it is cut, and then she heads to the sewing machine, turning it on. She takes a piece of black fabric, rips it in half, and repeatedly puts it through the sewing machine; she holds it up each time showing that the fabric is not sewn together.

She begins handing out post-cards with tape on them to people in the room and asks them to place them anywhere in the room.”Does the object control the body?” she asks each person. The post-cards have a kitsch image of a “typical” man, standing in pajamas, smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper. Neff has written phrases on the cards like “Our sense is our weakness,” or “Our unity is a wasted womb.” The card also shows a flow of blood coming from his boxer shorts.

Now completely undressed save for her shoes, Neff opens up a plain paper bag, and takes out black ink, sterile needles, and anti-septic wipes: it becomes clear that she’s going to tattoo herself. She asks for more volunteers to hold the plywood, and four women step up: because it is too heavy, more people join in.

Neff ties a needle the tip of the plywood and gives the volunteers instructions on what to do. She wants them to rock back and forth and have the needle prick her stomach, tattooing her in the process. She draws a mark to aim for on her chest; it is in the shape of a drop of blood. The whole room chants “I have a body…We have a body,” rocking back and forth, creating the tattoo. After several minutes she then goes alone repeatedly stabbing herself with a new needle, finishing the tattoo, and continuing the phrase, while now adding “we had a body.” Without saying it directly, Neff makes everyone aware exactly what she’s talking about; this type of accomplishment takes an incredible amount of skill and understanding of your materials and your body in a space.

Her repetition of words took on new meanings based on the context of her actions and the tone of her voice. When she repeated “I have a body”, in the beginning it sounded like a unifying fact we all share, that the identity of the body is of self, not societal-ownership, but—near the end of the performance when she started repeating the same words, I felt there was a wave of sadness to them, now creating a connotation of acceptance for the self—regardless of what difficult circumstances or trauma it has been through. The tattoo (or scar) is a permanent reminder of the performance, but also a physical reminder of that history or memory.

Afterwards Neff dissolved the intensity of the performance, speaking in a calm voice stating she is done and thanking everyone; she wrapped a bandage around her stomach, began to clean up her materials, and asked if anyone wanted to keep a postcard. Neff discussed earlier in a talk at the Live Art Development Agency that she had experienced several miscarriages in her lifetime; this coolness after such an intense moment and vulnerable performance takes an incredible amount of control that can only be looked at with admiration.

Day 4 of Tempting Failure featured 6 artists at D:NA, a performance venue in the home of Ernst Fischer in Herne Hill, London. One performance was performed on the street, as well as a durational piece by Daniel Nicolae Djamo called Territorial marking (2015) at DescARTs in Croydon. Listed below is a recounting of the following exhibitions and performances in the order they occurred on July 24th.

Music in the modern age has become an isolating experience. Ipods and smartphones keep people tuned-in to their favorite tracks, but keeps them isolated in being able to share it with others. Robert Watts’s performance, Uncertainty Principals, brought together antique and modern technology.

When invited up into the flat, each person was given a pair of headphones and a screwdriver to “draw” with. At first you don’t fully understand what this means: Did they mean to make scratches on the floor? The surreal nature of Ernst Ficsher’s house throws you off and adds a relaxed and playful atmosphere with toy hamsters in balls running around. Robert then walks in silently holding a case full of records. He makes some arrangements on a device that I couldn’t identify (it looked like an old tape recorded) then he places a record on a record player. It becomes clear that we’re all hearing the same music through each of our headphones. Watts then begins handing spectators a vintage .45 rpm record as well as a screwdriver. It becomes clear that he wants us to “draw” or scratch on the records.

Scratching the vinyl in this way effectively destroys any pragmatic use the record may have had; In general, I’m leery of the term transformation, but in this case, the destruction of the object transforms the object. The record may have been sitting around unplayed collecting dust somewhere (which itself effectively destroys its “use”), but when it is used in this performance, it is given new purpose, and not only that, it becomes personalized to the person who created it that then can be shared to the group listening to it. This manipulation of the object is a kind of retroactive “sampling”, where the destruction of the old recording creates the new personalized recording; it can also be seen as a pun on the term “scratching”, a musical technique used on records by DJ’s , and in Rap and Hip-Hop music.

After the spectators are finished drawing, we hand the “destroyed” records back to Robert, where he begins playing them on a record player; the songs are oldies, like Hank Williams or the band ABC, and they crack and fizzle and skip, each distorted by the unique markings each person made. After he finishes all of our records, he stops, and begins to give back the records to each person. I was given a record with a picture of two elephants drawn on it. It was a simple performance, probably too simple, and I wish Watts went further with the ideas in this performance like playing with technology and art, as well as the shared experience of music. Perhaps he will revisit these ideas in the future.

In remembrance and honor to friend and artist, Anthea Toorchen, Ernst Fischer invited for a walk through his neighborhood Herne Hill next to Brixton in South East London. Toorchen had been working with found materials and objects. Her recent work composed of orange- and red-colored objects that she would puzzle together to organ-like sculptures to confront and question her disease that she deceased from in 2015.

Fischer chose only a few stops for his 2-h-walk, but smartly planted several seeds of knowledge at each of them. Bit by bit these seeds grew and transmuted into a bewildered garden of consistent information around rubbish, debris and junk via locality, myths, secrecy, etymology, self-care, fantasy, camp, art, home, sociality, responsibility, the public and the personal, the unwanted and the odd and so forth. One could follow Fischer at all times, or linger in a thought that he triggered in you. He would not forget to remind you of anecdotes, he told you earlier on, weave in specificities of the spaces you visited, or name other TF2016 artist’s work, here Sue Fox’s photo series “The Forgotten”, to encompass his talking tour from always another angle. With his gentle circumspection to everything, Fischer created a satisfying, temporary whole. His enthusiasm and openness gave an easy access to listen and to be with him along this pleasing and captivating Sunday afternoon.

We walk into a room in which Alanna stands in a central position, and we are invited to take seats around her. She is crocheting her own hair around her naked body; she has started from the head down, and the laborious process taking place sees it come lower at a snail’s pace from around her shoulders. Her entire head is covered – contained and concealed – and no doubt, her thoughts are elsewhere, lost in the sway of menial gestures and muscle memory.

In this durational piece, Alanna performed over the span of an hour and the audience were able to come and go as they pleased. I came in once at the beginning for a long period, took a break, and returned for the last ten minutes to find Alanna’s back now shimmering with sweat. She has been working with her own hair for the past ten years and has begun this particular project in 2009 – only exhibiting it as a live performance once before in Sweden last year. When I asked about the possible motivations to begin this work, she told me that she had always been interested in materiality – and when the desire for materiality as a medium came, the natural choice was her own hair as she was in an environment where it stood out – perhaps acting as an emblem, at once of her dissimilarity and her identity.

On entering a living room in Herne Hill, we are greeted by Sebastian Hau-Walker dressed in a white shirt, white trousers and a graduation hat. He offers us a cushion, a choice of a mango, lime or orange and a pair of wireless headphones. We are encouraged to lie down. Hau-Walker presses play on a home video from 1995, which documents him as a child growing up in Mexico. The video is screened on both a TV set and a projection upon the ceiling. Through the headphones the sound of the video is amplified. We see a 6 year old Sebastian in a tinier version of his white attire and graduation hat, amongst a sea of other children dressed identically. For the duration of the piece the video spans school life, home life, trips to the sweet shop and visits to other local kids at their homes.

The artist searches around the space for a piece of fruit from an audience member. The fruit, having just been handed to them, is asked to be returned and he sinks his teeth into it. Fruit in mouth he picks up a VHS tape from a pile in the corner. He holds it in right hand and beats it against his left folded elbow until it cracks open. As though extracting a seed he snaps out a film reel, climbs up to the projection on the ceiling and sticks it upon the moving image. The film from the reel cascades down upon the audience in a rapid swirl of dark ribbon. The artist moves around the space repeating these actions, simultaneously embodying primal actions, institutional rigidity, the foreign body, the local body, the imported, the appropriated, the obsolete. It is magical and astounding to witness their body fluidly moving between and amongst these states.

As the hour goes by, Hau-Walker buries us in tangled film ribbon and hands us back bitten fruit.

Having installed a new layer of earth out of discarded, now useless VHS tape, he tries to gather up his trails and binds them around his head. As he pulls upon the ribbons he brings everything that he’s entangled in the gradual burial. People’s toes, legs, fingers, bags, hair, fruit are pulled and the tape is slowly dragged towards a vortex where the artist is placed. He gradually moves to exit. An audience member refuses to let go of what is being pulled away from them. There is a suspended moment of tension and they both pull. Hau-Walker wins and walks out onto the street. We watch him walk away through the living room window.

A length of rope bookended by two nooses. One ensnares a mammoth block of ice. The other, Phillip Bedwell’s neck.

In Echoes, Phillip attempts, and inevitably fails, to lift and suspend the block using himself as a counterweight. He strains and adjusts as the ice dangles before him. We witness his struggle as the weight becomes too much. The ice falls. He breathes. He sets. Sometimes he weeps. Then he tries again. The cycle continues.

Phillip beautifully delves into dichotomies. Warmth/cold. Life/death. The attrition which melts the ice, making it easier to lift, simultaneously breaks his body. Mostly however, it is Phillip’s disrupted identity which captures the mind. His body is a form of hyper-masculinity, he is a Roman legionnaire, swelling and muscular, a demonstration of the power and strength conceptualised to the male form. Yet, in his struggle, he exposes his frailty, his vulnerability, his weakness. These are the antiseptic of conditioned manhood, that we have been told to be so afraid to admit.

The melting ice stains his skin as it turns to water, leaving traces of the battle in which he forges himself. Perhaps he too is changing state, defining himself a new man in the conflict.

IN/OUT is a small noise piece I devised with the help of my mentor Clive Henry in the mentorship programme for TF2016. It began with noise and writing. I was doing a lot of home recording with a contact mic to amplify objects and I was using distortion/gain- and a host of other manipulations- to bring this source into its fullest noise splendour. I wanted to build a ‘noise ritual’ which could allow me to lose myself momentarily – to confront life and death and the small spaces in between. I took some inspiration from Butoh, the Dance of Darkness, in its clawing mindless atavism I saw what I wanted for the ritual – and I found a long umbilical string extending from it to my practice and scribbles with automatic writing and noise.

I think it did meet my expectations. I was meant to be responding to the theme ‘In Utero’, and I’m not sure many could guess this without being told – consciously or unconsciously I always seem to evade the very thing I want a piece to revolve around. Just because it was central in my mind does not mean it should, or has to be, in yours.

Day 3 of Tempting Failure featured 7 artists at Matthews Yard in Croydon, London alternating between the two venues, Studio Theatre Utopia and descARTS, one performance that was performed on the street, as well as a video screening by Tom Cardew. Listed below is a recounting of the following exhibitions and performances in the order they occurred on July 23rd.

This is an invitation to stop. Out of personal experience, Rihannon Armstrong generated a one-on-one performance that offers you to rest in situ, in the here and now.

She picks you up from the clock tower in Croydon, that you are walked to by a member of Temping Failure’s production team. Then she walks with you for five minutes along and under streets, around a number of corners to a specific corner of concrete by the Croydon College. She talks you through all the steps of your time with her while you are walking. You walk quite fast to reach the point of stopping. Fast forward to pause. But you feel calm through her gentle voice. She sees her piece as a tandem exercise. She is your guide of care, pause, and hold.

Upon arrival, you will find yourself standing right next to her as a starting point of stopping. She has a cushion for your head and shawl to protect you from the sun at your leisure to feel comfortable when lying down. On the count of three you both sit down. On another count of three you lie down. On a last count of three you turn over to your right side. You breathe. She asks you to be aware of your breath, to let loose and sink into the concrete, to observe your locale and to close your eyes at your will. She asks for permission to put her hand on your shoulder and talks to you about the ok-ness to lie here and rest, to do nothing for once and feel your very bodily existence in the very place you are in. It is OK to stop. Then she leaves you. She lets you rest by yourself. This is your time. – After a moment, Rihannon’s voice arises, touching you softly out of your rest. She walks you back. You have another five minutes together. At the clock tower she thanks you warmly for resting along her and devotes herself to a next participant.

Sculpture has a deep association with performance, where artists consider the movement of the body is of the same interest with the creation of the object. Here Rebecca O’Brien presents us with a “living sculpture” for her performance. Walking in we see O’Brien eyes closed and standing still on a box in a traditional statue pose of Venus, or as the title suggests, Hera; we surround her in a circle like a monument. In the darkened theater a spotlight shines on her; her body is covered in a gray material, possibly plaster, but it looks like concrete.

She slowly begins to move, animating her body and brushing off the material revealing her white skin. Flecks of the material fall, making light tapping sounds as the pieces fall. When she begins to move faster, the tapping sounds become amplified and louder, and what sounded like falling pebbles now sound like falling stones. She begins to move more rapidly, gesturing and posing herself in traditional feminine statue poses. New sounds appear, loud hammering, drilling, construction sounds, bringing up images of a construction site, a traditionally male environment.

The classical female image was constructed by men. Using drills, hammers and other construction equipment, the image of the female body was manipulated and constructed by men to form the “ideal” beauty. Although O’Brien does not directly comment on this, the sounds of construction do sound abrasive when contrasted with the natural human body. She is making us aware of this subject, and letting us form our own opinions.

Off Land began with the artist Alicia Radage’s female naked body in a shoulder stand in the apex of a white walled studio with a wooden floor. On her feet she balances an old rusty, curled spike and from her asshole erupts nine lengths of wool attached to round mirrors spread across the room. The image is astonishing. Woolen boundaries are navigated by the spectator, the artist creating them but also being constructed by them. The lighting reflected into the mirror creating lunar shapes across the room. The work felt fiercely feminine. As the three hour piece progressed, she moved from balancing the spike on the floor to standing, the wool bursting from inside of her. She stood over the mirrors examining her vagina. Her body became fractured images in the surrounding mirrors. The nine mirrors made me think of the nine months of pregnancy and as the artist held the pit of her stomach and inhaled deeply, I felt the pain of woman as the keeper of creation.

She moved across the space dragging the mirrors presenting the image of a prisoner dragging a ball and chain. She tentatively stroked the wool and holding her waist length hair in one arm it caused me to question the weight of a woman’s hair; the responsibility, the feminine, the curse.

Her actions and stillness rippled like waves over the space injecting the most electrifying energy into the studio. The piece heightened in pace as she began spinning in circles tangling the wool, the artist becoming visibly exhausted at the velocity of the movement. Drawing the mirrors closer it was as if she wanted to somehow regain control of the extensions that ran from her own body.

The performance ended with the artist sitting, legs spread biting the wool from her attachment. Removing them by force. She gagged as the wool stuck to her tongue. The lasting image of a woman ridding that which she had loved, that which had confined her and that which was her fractured reflection.

The artist’s process gave way to my own emotional process and this work creates inner movement and shifts within those lucky enough to see it.

The spectators were asked to sit in one of the four squares at the start of the performance, each separated from the long white fabric, sackcloth that formed a cross; Natalie Raven and Dagmar Schwitzgebel stood on opposite ends of the vertical line holding up their hands with palms facing out. The two walk towards each other and meet at the cross-section of the cross with their bodies contrasting in physique. Their hands meet in force with their arms raised like a steeple; they both get on their knees, pushing back and forth in opposition.

Schwitzgebel stands up and picks up the fabric cutting a hole in middle and placing it over her head and covering her body like religious robes. In the middle of the cross, a pile of ashes or soot is exposed, reminiscent of ashes normally used to form the cross on the face for Ash Wednesday. Raven picks up another piece of fabric and does same, but it becomes clear that she wears the garment looser, with her feminine body fully exposed. Both go into their actions, defining their identities separately.

Although no specific meaning was discernable from their use of Christian iconography and religious gestures, it was clear that Raven and Schwitzgebel had used this iconography for their own symbolic purposes: carefully considered actions and images of the cross, baptism, religious attire, and prayer could all be seen throughout this performance. Performances dealing with religion as their subject (specifically Christianity), tend to have a moral stance on the issue of belief or non-belief (or institution), but rarely do you see a performance show the artist expressing their own conflicted attitudes, adding their own perspective to the conversation rather than dictating it.

Raven’s actions were more sexual and opposed to the religious beliefs. Her breasts and clitoris were freely exposed for the spectators to see, making gestures in the air that suggested masturbation, slamming her head into the pile of ashes, and spitting it out when it got in her mouth.

Opposing her was Scwitzgebel, who wore the sackcloth draped over her body like a robe covering her female body. Her actions were filled with religious piety and silent prayer, kneeling and forming a cross with the ashes, gently rubbing it on her face and bringing her emotions close to tears. After the performance, one viewer asked me if there was anything personally significant about the ashes: “Was it someone she knew?”, he asked, “or something that was close to her that brought her to the brink of tears?” I couldn’t say.

When the ash pile became smaller and smaller with use until it was gone, the two women stood together on the stage side by side. Raven took a tin pale filled with water, and gently cleaned Scwitzgebel’s ash covered body and face. Scwitzgebel did the same for Raven, gently cleaning her arms and face. The performance began with the two women in opposition and open hostility towards each other, and now they end with an embrace, with the two women becoming one soul.

You are allowed to enter a space, a sanctuary space, but spatially before, you enter through the smell of a saluting gesture. A gesture that in an instant will make you become part of the following as a witness. Burnt sage is fanned down your body. You are here for a reason. This certain, sudden companionship is a grounding to the metamorphic transformation that is about to happen. This is an impactful ritual. You can feel the supreme rightness of every material decorating the space. Everything has its definite purpose. Everything makes absolute sense. Nothing could be in another place. It all belongs together.

Nicola Hunter sits on a throne. Her head covered in a crown of red roses and a long blue veil falling down until her knees. She wears a white, silk wedding dress. Her legs are spread. Barefoot she sits. White high heels filled with a juice of blood and strawberries between her feet. In front of her a big pile of dirt covered with flowers. Everything sits quietly. A droning sound belongs to this first imagery and with a slow waving of her fingers, Hunter begins to shed. She sheds a layer of life, its influence and its lived interpretation. The ritual has begun.

An amassment of objects, actions, symbolism, and referential communication emanates, and so she weaves her materials and artistic vocabulary together to a crucial climax from which she then descents and departs. Beforehand she has been weaving multiple layers of her voice together to sonically supplement her affairs into a choir of vocalizations, screams and breaths. There is no escape from the density over-coming you: She is crawling backwards around the pile of dirt and flowers with the dress lifted to expose her ass, pulling the blood-filled high heels with her, slurping in those heels around her center installation and squeezing the strawberries, digging into the pile in search of a candle, masturbating with that candle on it, going back to the throne and cutting herself off her dress with a razor blade, throwing her crown into the fucked flower-dirt-bed, pulling the veil off that was held with needles and syringes, thus letting her forehead bleed all over her face and upper body, throwing the dress away and pulling it across the room, nailing it with the needles onto a black wooden board in opposition to the throne, finally just throwing the also blood-covered dress over the board, burying the shoes in the dirt, and starting to blacken herself out. Outrageously she lets loss, grief and frustration fight with love, life and passion. Un-, but knowingly she draws us that image of painful beauty, of a juxtaposing incomprehensibility, of the always inexplicable, and only experiential manifestation of being alive.

All this is accompanied by a shamanic figure, Alison Brierley. With numerous instruments of different sensorial perception and inclination she pulls the old, known Nicola into a new role yet to materialize, into a new purpose, yet to embody. Nicola embraces this shift and after her manifold undertakings sits kingly back in the throne, covered in black paint bedecked with a feather ruff collar. Only her face and her vagina remain in color from a before. You can’t erase your history, since you are here. In fierce grace she sits and light fades her into a wild darkness.

Anne Beane began her performance 5 Duets with Strangers on the stage of Utopia Theatre, casually leaning against the wall, as if to avoid the focus of the crowd. Lucy walks in from stage right, and begins talking. It’s interesting how she immediately became the focus of the performance with Anne improvising and playing off the “stranger”. The subject of the conversation begins with Lucy’s own nervousness and her gender identity: “I don’t know how to be a woman,” said Lucy, “Don’t apologize ever!”, yells Bean into the mike. “What do I identify as? I don’t,” said Lucy. “I hate the word identity,” said Bean, “I think it’s one of the poisons of all what’s wrong.” The conversation is digressive, talking about their favorite animals, pies etc… and there is an expectation that something will happen, but it doesn’t. The lights lower and go back up, singling the end of the duet.

Dominique, a young violinist walks in next. Anne starts recounting a story about her father who played violin, and Dominique playfully improvises and reacts to the narrative. Next, a man with a guitar, plays a simple chord repeatedly, and both ask personal questions about each other: “Do you love anyone unconditionally?”, he asks. The mood suddenly shifted when a man named Richard comes out to play the piano. There is a clear uneasy tension between the two; he begins to play and stops.

Comedy in performance rarely intentionally exists I think because artists run the risk or fear of presenting their work as entertainment. 5 Duets had elements of comedy mainly from a release of tension and unease of each stranger’s duet with Bean. In each of these duets, it was interesting how each stranger led the action of the performance, and depending on their mood, controled the tone as well. This was a good example of a performance playing with the idea of entertainment, while maintaining elements of performance.Presented as a series of musical duets, each technically was unsuccessful in execution due to unpredictable interactions between the strangers.

Day 2 of Tempting Failure featured eight artists at Matthews Yard in Croydon, London alternating between the two venues, Studio Theatre Utopia and DescARTS, and one performance that was performed on the street. Listed below is a recounting of the following exhibitions and performances in the order they occurred on July 22nd.

Sue Fox standing in-front of her photo exhibition, The Forgotten (The Unborn) at DescARTS.Photo: Julia Bauer, Courtesy of Tempting Failure

Sue Fox – The Forgotten (The Unborn) (2016)

By Natalie Ramus

Displayed on the wall were photographs produced by Sue Fox of babies that died in the womb. These bodies are normally only viewed by medical professionals, or maybe the mothers that lose them, so to be able to see these beautiful unborn bodies is a privilege. It seems strange to me that they are so beautiful. We are taught to fear the mortality of the body, but to look is to acknowledge and remember, and Fox allows us to embrace this in the sensitive way that these bodies are presented. She holds light over them, creating a quiet moment to connect and embrace the experience of empathy. I become very aware that we were all once fragile and small just like these bodies… but we have no memory of our body in any other state than born. As I look I start to think about this other existence, this other world where we once lived, inside our mother; these lives presented by Fox only existed there. What we see when we look at the tiny humans is not only a fragmented moment in time, but one the is transformative for all who witness it.

Home office, West Croydon, London. A small installation with two chairs on the pavement. From across the street hammering construction sounds swap over. Cars, buses and trams rush by. People too. People, trapped in their daily frustration in an environment of concrete. In the midst of this, a woman with widespread, open arms joyfully asks you to dance with her. If you join in you are introduced and instructed to a small history of her project culminating in a transmissive dance, that makes you depart from the very place you are in.

This is a choreographic act of border transgression, states Rita Marcalo on her website. With a small crew, she went to “The Jungle” refugee camp in Calais. A place, that is a UK border, but not UK land. A place, the UK paid France for to shift this border from the English mainland to the French one. A place to prevent refugees from entering the UK and finding shelter. The only border of a nation state in the world that is not on the state’s geographic land.

In the camp she led a dance workshop to simply bring people together and had been overwhelmed by its participants, who extended the one hour workshop to four hours. Within that the idea was born to learn dances of refugees to their favorite music. This led Rita to bring a part of the project back to the UK and let her audience here dance with refugees that she would impersonate, creating a 10 minute dance conversation. I danced with Addisu, an Ethiopian young man, to high, energetic rave music. We are laughing about the moves we are making and I forget my surroundings. Klik, klik, boum.

Dancing by default is one of the activities, where you, as a human being, while being awake and alert, forget to think and let loose into your own present stage. Dancing with Addisu though, he talks to you over the same headphones you are wearing to listen to his favorite dance track, makes you aware of his very absence. An absence that becomes crucially painful and numbing. An absence that divides you from him. Politically, geographically and even humanely, because you can only wish him from afar, what he hopes for in your ears. With tears in my eyes I end this dance. With tears in her eyes Rita thanks me for dancing with a stranger.

He stands naked and silent with his clothes at his feet, waiting for you to walk in. A lone spotlight is shining on him. He puts on his clothes, and leans on the ground, slowly unscrolling a piece of paper. He begins to read: “I was wrong to exist, from miscarriage to conception…I was wrong to lament my body…I was wrong for saying faggot.”

During the course of his performance, Daniel Holmes read through a poem that dealt with all of the wrongs he was told to live by and form his identity. He reads from the paper from bottom to top, as one long confession of the social conditioning he was taught to believe in. It is unknown whether these words were written to represent his own identity, or if it was intended to represent societies’ attitudes in general.

After he finishes speaking, he leans on the paper, and begins to eat it. He chokes, he struggles, he heaves to the brink of throwing up. He literally eats his own words to the beginning from where he was formed. He then takes off his clothes and stands up. Is this a new beginning?

A woman cowers in a corner. Five people at a time may observe her. She wears a light-rose colored dress with ribbons. She could be a girl hiding in her children’s room. Her face between her shoulders, she hides. Her blond hair falls into her eyes. Her hands behind her, below her back, palms up, reach out. They are visible and visible thus is the pain she induces on them. She stands on them with the high heel leather boots going up to her knees. One heel of 10 cm and 1 cm diameter per hand pushes her weight into herself. This is not only a girl hiding. Slowly, in observing all the surroundings, clearly a complexity unfolds that offers you to take it in or not. This it is your complexity, your thoughts, your feelings, everything that you may meditate on while observing, while seeing her.

When you get close enough, she looks at you through the round mirror that she stands on. She looks at you with a rose, sad face, an innocent face, but a face with strong eyes. She will not look away unless you look away. She will not blink, preferring to shed tears in order to look at you. So you look, if you dare. You will also look under her dress and glimpse at her vagina through the rose lace slip she wears. You are confronted with your very own twist of morality and fantasy, legality and awkwardness, capability and disarming. This is an endless play of voyeurism versus looking through. What do you see? Miller created a dense environment with a simple gesture. A million stories can be told, while she remains in her painfully, cute pose. Chapeau!

“I thought it [A S S I M I L A T I O N] would date,” said Malik Nashad Sharpe, after a rigorous performance, still sweating, and a face still covered in glitter. “I didn’t think it would have relevance past the date it was conceived. I realized it has to be malleable, because this is what happens in the U.S.”

It’s surprising and wonderful to see a familiar artist in a former country; I just didn’t expect it would be this soon. Earlier this May, I had seen Malik perform a version of his work A S S I M I L A T I O N at Panoply Performance Laboratory in Brooklyn, New York, and now I saw a new version of it here at Tempting Failure. Although there were similar actions and elements within the performance, both the presentation and the structure was different from when I had seen him several months earlier; this performance was tighter with less of an emphasis on materials. Here, Malik performed at Studio Theater Utopia on a stage that was raised and separated from the crowd, while at Panoply Lab, due to the structure of the venue, there was little to no separation from the crowd. Malik said that the performance was conceived two years before as a response to the then controversial Ferguson, Missouri shooting of Michael Brown, but the performance gained new relevance because of recent events, like the Orlando Pulse shootings, and a re-awakening of the Black Lives Matter movement in the public conscience with the shootings of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile and four police officers in Dallas.

Starting in the darkened theater, the lights come on and you see a minimal set-up with a mirror hanging and a fold-out table with a bowl on-top. Malik is wearing makeup with rhinestones around his eyes. He begins to sing Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence”, with an emphasis on the line “Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again.” A recording of the song begins to play, and then Malik begins his choreography. During the song, gunshots are mixed in the audio, and every time they go off, he stumbles, the lights get dimmer, until the theater is dark with a spotlight focused on Malik who is on the ground and breathing heavily.

The lights come up. Now pacing in a circle, he chants “blood, blood, blood, bloody, blood,” for several minutes. He begins to say phrases like “I have PTSD from being an active member in my own life,” and “When I woke up this morning, the spirit of this nation has broken.” He walks to the mirror, puts on more lipstick, and then picks up the bowl, and pours what turns out to be glitter on-to his head. The glitter shines off the light. He begins to walk in a circle in the middle of the stage, and again starts to chant “blood, bloody, blood, death.” He begins to sign, and begins a new set of choreography, still chanting and signing until he goes off-stage. Fade to Darkness.

It was interesting seeing this same work in another country, and seeing how a foreign audience would react to these recent events in America. I preferred this version of the performance, because it did seem more focused in its execution; the performance benefited from a shorter length. If there was one issue, it was the use of glitter that elicited some cheering and laughter from the audience. While the material’s use was appropriate in identifying himself as queer, it may have been too light-hearted for the serious subject matter of the performance.

Two identical brothers squirm – both unborn, both ‘boxed in’- connected by some walls of cardboard and some stabs of sound. Some clanging – and some telepathic sibling rivalry sounds the tremors of an imminent birthing ritual. Once born, the house of the unborn is torn up; the ‘contaminated’ recycling, the vomited refuse of the unborn is discarded.

I am used to Clive using sound sparingly, with breath and body and despair in its stead, and the hoarse throat and natural cataclysm of abrupt endings. I am used to Yol collecting his various ephemera and ‘sounding’ them with an uncanny skill – with an ear (and touch) like a pioneering caveman enraptured by cavernous sound. The screaming of cut-up babble contorting into new languages: imagining new landscapes (greener pastures, away from the permanently boxed darkness of mind).

What I am used to is certainly what we got – primal escape artists clawing to freedom with the help of knives and rusty metal, a spoon and some kind of oat-fruit-bar-thing. Their bizarre dialogue bounced back and forth with a comical rapport. It comes to my attention that I may not have been able to come out of this how I’d hoped.

Xavier de Sousa’s performance acted as a monologue (as he described it) that invited participants to engage in the ambiguity of cultural or historic identity. It became clear that a majority of the performers this night made more theatrical decisions for their performances. In the Studio Theatre Utopia room the audience is sitting on chairs on the ground while Sousa is sitting on the stage that is made-up to look like a dining room or kitchen. A table is set with silverware and food, soup is being cooked, clothes are hanging in the back, and a smaller table is in the background holding plates and dishes. He talks casually about the history of the traditional Portuguese soup and sausage he is making. He offers a shot of Cachaça to people who have never tried it. I try it for the first time; the only thing I can compare it to is a strong vodka. He talks about how Christopher Columbus may have been from Portugal, and that Catherine of Braganza helped introduce the tradition to tea drinking to Britain. He then puts on the dresses that were hanging, and introduces a traditional dance to a participant. He states he no longer feels Portuguese now that he lives in the U.K.

Afterwards, with the dinner nearly ready, he asks people to stand up who are hungry. Several people stand up, including me. He asks people where they are from, and chooses three people because of their identity of being immigrants. After a friendly chat about performance over soup and sausage, Sousa then hangs a cloth across the stage, blocking the view of the audience. The conversation shifts to issues of immigration, and topics like Brexit. “Is this a friendly conversation,” one of the participants said. Listening to these conversations, I begin to realize that even if I had been asked to come up, as an American, I wouldn’t have much to offer on these topics of Brexit, or refuge crisis’. I remember walking into the subway one morning, and saw a newspaper scattered on the seats. I saw the word Brexit in a headline, and didn’t know at all what it meant. I still don’t know its full consequences.

Traveling from a double-decker bus to a train to Croydon and down the path to Matthews Yard, the Tempting Failure performance and noise art festival began with the improvised vocal performance by Anthony Elliot and Wajid Yassen. Studio Theatre Utopia is a small black box theater with the crowd facing the two performers who were isolated on-top a large blank sheet of paper stretched across the center of the stage. It would be easy to call this performance as a form “action painting”, but Elliot’s emphasis was on the sounds being generated which then influenced his decision making on what prints he made. Throughout the performance he would use a large sculpture covered in wet black paint to make prints that resembled geometric patterns, linked octagons that looked similar to chemistry equations. Then he would run contact mics over the printed lines. Yassen remained uninvolved in the print making, but collaborated with Elliot by working the electronics and making vocalizations.

The creation of performance art actually has a closer relationship to the creation of music than any other discipline, where the act is live, and is destroyed as soon as it is created: The Rolling Stones lyric “Our love is like our music, its here, and then its gone,” comes to mind. Aside from the sound waves they create, where is the physical “presence” of music? Is it the body manipulating the instrument? the instrument creating the sound? the imprints of paint on the paper?

Sue Fox previewing her exhibition, The Forgotten (The Unborn), during the opening reception of Tempting Failure.Photo: Helena Sands, Courtesy of Tempting Failure

Afterwards, Sue Fox gave a preview of her photo (documentation) exhibition titled, The Forgotten (The Unborn). Fox stood in front of the crowd and read aloud a poem that spoke about the nature of the work. Three photo prints were hung side by side as she read. This is life before it began, before it had a chance to live. One small child looked barely a foot long lying on its back, while another was covered with a sheet no bigger than a pillow case. The photos are startling and the circumstance of these prenatal deaths was not discussed: possibly from miscarriage, possibly from complications of a pre-mature birth. Documentation in performance captures life and actions as it happened; this is life unlived before actions could be made, before memories could be formed, but for those who witnessed them, they are memories that will not be forgotten.